
Marty Cagan and several other thought leaders talk about great product companies. Several companies with strong product cultures are showing impressive growth and customer impact.
Several other companies hope to transform into strong product culture but transformations fail - a lot! They mostly fail because transformation efforts overly focus on process improvements or on training and upskill efforts. This approach doesn’t work because to bring about any change, there needs to be a holistic approach.
In this post, I dig into the four pillars that work together to achieve the desired transformation. I am passionate about transforming teams and organizations to be customer-centric and product-led and have worked in this space for a long time. These techniques help build great product cultures. I have observed some things that work well and others that get in the way of such change management.
What is great product culture?
In a previous post I wrote about what a great product company looks like according to Marty Cagan and how you might be able to identify if you work at one.
Some of the characteristics of good product-led organizations
Customer led where teams focus on continuous discovery to identify the right problems that teams can solve to provide customer and business value
Product Managers are carefully hired, trained, and coached.
Creating cross-functional teams that work together to solve for the customer
Building empowered teams where leaders provide context but provide freedom to build.
Teams are not process-heavy or in a “build-trap” to deliver to timelines
Teams work closely together to continuously iterate on solutions instead of PMs throwing requirements over the fence.
How do we transform our company to a great product comapany?
Transforming an organization to become truly a great product company is not easy. It takes a well thought out strategy and pulling several levers that solve for structural as well as behavioral hurdles that get in the way of change.
1. People and Skills:
Organizations should look to having the right people in the right roles with the right skills.
📚 Skills:
Ensuring product teams have the right skills is critical to transformation. However, a lot of transformation efforts primarily focus on skill development but training is not the silver bullet for transformation.
Engineering is often a big focus for top talent. Sometimes, I hear the excuse of how the number of PMs in an organization is not as big as engineering and hence focus should be on engineers. Therein lies the problem. Despite being one of the smallest functions, product management is the most critical to building products.
“Product Managers are like the mortar in a brick wall. Like mortar, they must fluidly fill the gaps to make the whole team stronger.” - Ravi Mehta
PMs should have the skills to gain deep empathy for the customer, have command of the data, be up to speed with the market and industry, and understand the company's business and how their product fits in. In addition to hard functional skills, they also need to have strong interpersonal, communication skills, resilience, passion for the customer, etc., This section is not to dive into all the skills needed for strong PMs but to recognize that there are several skills that PMs will have to continuously develop but skill development is only one aspect of the overall transformation.
There are several skill dimensions proposed by several people. I created one for internal use as well. To give you an idea, I am sharing this public rubric by Ravi Mehta. Learn more here

💪 People:
It’s all about the people. It is important to have the right people in the right jobs. Hiring the right people for the right roles, onboarding them, providing them with ongoing learning opportunities, and helping them thrive is important to ensure we are building great teams.
Great product teams have missionaries who are customer obsessed, collaborative, have an owner mindset, resilient, and have a growth mindset. This is not just relevant for PMs but for the cross-functional teams across all functions - PM, Eng, Design, research, analytics, PMO, etc.,
Leaders are a key part of the change. Often they are mainly leveraged as executive champions but not as the ones who need to change. Product leaders are key to embracing product best practices and coaching their teams to achieve product excellence. As an example, if we want to bring a writing culture to PMs, are leaders learning to read written narratives? In “Product Leadership is hard”, Marty Cagan talks about the role of leaders in building empowered teams which are the foundation of great product companies.
2. Tools and Frameworks:
The best people in the best roles can get frustrated and ineffective without the right tools, frameworks, and standards.
⚙️ Tools:
Product Management tools are getting better every day. Having access to the best tools will help make PMs and product teams effective. Tools that help implement product best practices, that help teams manage their workflow, etc will help them become more effective.
Finding the right tools is just not enough. Helping everybody understand the value of the tools, and standardizing tools will make adoption easier.
📝Frameworks:
Frameworks are a set of guidelines, resources or techniques that help PMs and product teams build better products. Continously identifying and developing the right frameworks for the teams to use is an important part of transformation as it would simplify product development and develop consistency. Some popular framworks below
Assumption mapping
Jobs To Be Done
Design Sprint
Opportunity Solution tree
5 Whys
Discovery framwork of double diamond
North Star framework
Porter’s 5 forces
Business model canvas
Working Backwards
RICE for prioritiation
KANO Model for prioritization
Product strategy canvas
4D framework
Assessing product opportunities
etc.,
3. Values and Culture
✔️ Values:
Values are often overlooked as the soft mushy stuff but values are what will last beyond any single leader. They will create a long-lasting impact. Values are not nice sound words on a screen or badge. These translate into reality through who gets promoted and celebrated. So it is essential
“
Culture eats strategy for breakfast” - Peter Drucker
🌎 Culture:
Even if you hire the best people and support them with everything needed, if the culture is bad, they will leave. It is important to design the culture just like a product - to ensure it reflects that values we want employees to live by. To be truly a great product company, we have to be customer-centric. We have to ensure the culture supports it by ensuring any product that is not pro customer is stopped. Some ways we can create the right culture are
Celebrate people who are bright spots and doing the right things
Promote PMs who are embodying the right behaviors
Exit people who are acting against the values you have set forth.
"Our culture focuses on helping us achieve excellence” - Netflix culture deck
4. Systems
We can’t just implement a change strategy without puting systems in place that ensure that everything is working as expected. Some systems to consider
6 Pagers/PR FAQ to help teams working crossfunctionally, focus on the customer and validate solutions before building products
Performance management systems to ensure PMs are operating as expected
6 pager/PR FAQ reviews that will help teams work backwards and be customer centric
Design critiques or CX reviews that help teams focus on building the right experiences instead of focsing on
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